Philipp Schmidt

I am curious about most things, and passionate about learning in communities. I design open tools, platforms, and organizations for sharing and collaboration.

Short Bio

Philipp Schmidt is Director of Learning Innovation at the MIT Media Lab, where he leads the ML Learning initiative and conducts research on learning communities. His work spans many aspects of technology-enabled learning systems. He is a cofounder and board member of Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU), a non-profit organization that provides access to online higher education through public libraries. He has been a leader in the field of digital credential systems, co-authored the original whitepaper on open badges, and designed the first version of Blockcerts, an open standard for issuing, managing, and verifying academic certificates that uses the Bitcoin blockchain. Philipp recently launched the MIT Refugee Learning Accelerator, a capacity-building program for learning-technology developers in the Middle East that addresses the refugee education crisis. Philipp served on the founding board of the OpenCourseWare Consortium, co-authored the Cape Town Open Education Declaration, and is an advisor to a number of non-profit and for-profit education projects. He has received Shuttleworth and Ashoka fellowships, and came to MIT as a Media Lab Director's fellow. Philipp lives in Boston and sometimes misses Cape Town and Cologne.